A group of motherboard enthusiasts working for GIGABYTE, sharing their insider knowledge and general ramblings of the motherboard business, the tech industry, latest technologies and trends, and other random odds and ends.

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

GIGABYTE unleash the new OC weapon, Z87X-OC!

Well, where do I start? Oh yeah, I’m excited! Haswell, it’s finally here and ready to go! GIGABYTE has unleashed the new weapon you all know as the “OC” board, namely Z87X-OC.
The history of OC boards goes back many years ago now with GIGABYTE’s iconic X58A-OC. True overclockers have raved on about this board and still mention it in the early hours of Taipei’s Computex afterparties to this day. This board was the first of its kind, a board dedicated to enthusiasts and overclockers. A board with a sole purpose to focus on a niche community of liquid nitrogen sniffing dudes and crazy watercooling geniuses with their intricate WC loops and masterful tubing configurations celebrating the heart of the technological componentry in people’s PCs, the motherboard! HWBOT wrote an article about this OC board and OC DNA and its significance to the community at the time which I suggest you read to learn about the importance of these to overclockers and Pieter’s long term vision which is pretty interesting in the retrospect!
The core focus of OC board was to make a weapon of a board to it’s bigger brother X58A-UD9 which was skyrocketing HiCookie in its heyday to world best OCer and unprecedented domination. The board was designed to rid of the “bells and whistles” (i.e. no marketing gimmick features), specific features at heart of it’s followers’ requirements and aggressive price point that most could afford. Unfortunately, it had one fatal flaw and that was it’s release date delay which made it virtually obsolete with new platform launch shortly to follow.

Fast forward past a few evolutionary and some soul searching steps and competitors mimicking the OC logos and a few scattered features but forgetting about the OC DNA and we end up at this week’s launch. GIGABYTE is back to the original OC DNA of making a weapon, streamlined, mean performing machine with the absolute best price point possible and GIGABYTE Z87X-OC is born as is its bigger brother Z87X-OC Force.

It’s been a short few months leading up to the launch I must say and the GIGABYTE team and it’s army of beta testers and inhouse RD & bios teams set upon earlier than normal to do what they are all passionate about and get the GIGABYTE Z87X-OC board ready for the bright lights of launch day. I say “a short” few months as they literally flew past so fast and I can’t recall having been more motivated and having more fun with any board other than the original OC board I talked about.
Let me clear something up for all the guys that contacted me, my colleagues and friends who’ve had experience with the new OC board. Z87X-OC is the heart of the OC design platform and the baseline that was used to build upon with other boards including the OC Force. It’s not a cut down version but rather THE BASE LINE to other motherboards. It is the one, don’t let the price point full you wink wink !
For the extreme overclockers out there, here is a bios HiCookie and Dinos22 (yours truly) used at Corsair and Intel’s Extreme OC event a few days ago in which we took out the $4K Highest Memory Frequency prize. For more information on this competition you can check out an article made by a well known Australian Magazine, PC & Tech Authority over here.

We are finalising the GIGABYTE Tweak Launcher (GTL 2.0) software and will update it soon, keen an eye on this blog!
There are a number of new features on the latest OC range of boards and I suggest you head over the GIGABYTE Z87 OC range microsite to find out more about them. In the coming weeks we’ll do some OC guides and video introductions of specific features and how to get the most out of them.